Twitter Hit by DDoS Attack; Other Sites Wobble

The popular microblogging site Twitter went down early Thursday morning, with the site's operators confirming the outage on a status blog. Facebook sputtered, too, but it was unclear how widespread the problems were.

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The popular microblogging site Twitter went down early Thursday morning, with the site's operators confirming the outage on a status blog as a denial-of-service attack.

Twitter originally offered no explanation for the outage, adding a characteristically pithy post on its Status blog titled, simply, "Site is Down". "We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly," the post read.

Shortly thereafter, however, the site confirmed that it was suffering a denial-of-service attack. "We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly," the site read. At about 11:21 AM EDT, Twitter reported that the site was back up, although PCMag.com staffers still couldn't access it.

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," Twitter chief executive Biz Stone said in a blog post. "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate."

PCMag.com staffers also noted problems with Facebook early Thursday, with the site failing to load briefly. The status site "downforeveryoneorjustme.com" also reported both Twitter and Facebook being down at about 9:45 AM Eastern time. Facebook was accessible shortly thereafter, although PCMag.com staffers reported a few glitches, such as problems with posting status updates and internal links.

"We're looking into it and will give you an update as soon as possible," a Facebook representative said via email.

LiveJournal also experienced a brief outage, but seemed to otherwise be operating normally.

The Twitter attack followed a similar DDoS attack earlier in the week. Sites operated by Gawker Media crashed on Monday, later believed to be the result of a DDoS attack against The Consumerist blog, which is owned by Consumers Union but whose content is hosted by Gawker Media.

Additional reporting by Wendy Sheehan Donnell and Chloe Albanesius. This story was updated at 8:22 AM PDT.

Brian Heater came to PCMag in 2006, after working at Laptop Magazine as a staff writer. His writing has appeared in Spin, The Onion, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Press, The Oklahoma Gazette, The Metro Santa Cruz, Heeb, and a lot of music magazines you’ve probably never heard of. He also runs the comics site The Daily Cross Hatch, which he strongly recommends you check out. One time Brian met the president. He had green hair back then. Long story.
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